The Relationship Between the Timing of the Formation of Conflict Repertoires and Variations in the Level of Violence. A Comparative Analysis of Lebanon and Belgium

The question of timing is treated here in its relation to violence in the context of two protracted histories of conflict: Lebanon and Belgium. The analysis is based on the notion of a conflict repertoire that designates the historically accumulated means of action accessible in the present to a pair of actors and from which these actors draw the dominant forms of their confrontation. Comparing the evolution of the privileged means of action in both cases across more than a century, it appears that the mobilization of Lebanese and Belgian contemporary communal actors embraces the same features as the repertoires inherited from the nineteenth century. Mobilizations in Belgium hinged on a repertoire of social movements that gave the conflict between Francophones and Dutch-speakers an essentially nonviolent dimension. Armed fighting in Lebanon operated by tapping into the available repertoire of civil wars and insurrections which confers an often violent dynamic to the conflict between religious communities. This contrast is due to an intersection, at a different time in each case, between the first conflicts and the crystallization of the modern state framework. The timing of the onset of the first conflicts, generating a new repertoire of collective actions, would not determine thereby the subsequent resurgence of conflict, but the occurrence or non-occurrence of violence within it; in other words, the violent or peaceful dimension of a conflict would depend on the order in which the first conflict and modern state structures historically occurred.